Create Implementation Council

[rabernat]

Here I am proposing we create a Zarr Implementation Council. I am also trying to make the language of our governance more reflective of the "one spec / many implementations" state of Zarr. There is not just one set of "core developers"; instead, each implementation has its own core developers.

To go along with this change, I would suggest we invite existing implementations into the zarr-developers GitHub organization and create teams for their core devs.

Having an Implementation Council will help with the ZEP process being discussed in #16.

[joshmoore]

Thanks for kicking this off, @rabernat! I've captured some more discussion-y thoughts as I read through.

[joshmoore]

Follow GH-level changes that will need to follow:

• Rename https://github.com/orgs/zarr-developers/teams/core-devs to python-devs (or similar)
  • Make https://github.com/orgs/zarr-developers/teams/azure-team a subteam of python-devs
  • Cleanup repos assigned to python-devs team
  • Review members of python-dev and check if they would prefer to be removed from the team
• Create an implementation-council (or similar) team
  • Add ZEP and zarr-specs repos to the implementation-council
• Possibly also:
  • create a contributors team (like dask's members team)
  • add blog, webpage, tutorials, community-calls, etc.

[rabernat]

I think we want to make the implementation council responsibilities as light as possible for now, to incentivize participation. The only core requirement for being on this council is to review the ZEPs from the pov of that implementation.

[jakirkham]

Agreed. Josh and I were just noting that core-devs has some overlapping permissions and thought some tidying would be appropriate to make room for the implementers' council.

If we agree generally, happy to propose some text to this PR or a new one to clean up the language around core-devs.

[meggart]

A big +1 also from my side. It always felt a bit strange to me to have (in theory) commit permissions to the zarr-python implementation while never having contributed to this repo. So this split between python-devs and implementation council makes things much cleaner. @joshmoore maybe you can add to your todo-list something like:

Review members of python-dev and check if they would prefer to be removed from the team

[joshmoore]

@meggart: added. Thanks for the suggestion.

[joshmoore]

Capturing it here from https://github.blog/2017-06-13-nested-teams-add-depth-to-your-team-structure/ and https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/organizing-members-into-teams/about-teams#nested-teams:

• only permissions and notifications propagate down the teams
• i.e. if a parent team has access to a repo, so does its child
• but then just because a child team has access, parents do not.
• members are not automatically added to subteams

So a few proposed hierarchies include:

Everything under one banner

• zarr-developers/all (or keep "contributors"? "community"?!)
  • zarr-developers/python
  • zarr-pythons/spec
  • ....

the same but deeper

• zarr-developers/all (or keep "contributors"? "community"?!)
  • zarr-developers/core-devs (or "implementors"? "languages"?)
    • zarr-developers/python
  • zarr-developers/spec
    • zarr-developers/implementation-council

or separate roots:

• zarr-developers/contributors
• zarr-developers/core-devs (or "implementors"? "languages"?)
  • zarr-developers/python
• zarr-developers/spec
  • zarr-developers/implementation-council

or an exact mapping of the governance doc:

• community
  • contributors
  • core-devs
    • python
    • ...
  • implementation-council
  • steering-council

Thoughts welcome. If I don't hear any feedback, I'll start implementing the last one.

[joshmoore]

@rabernat et al.: I pushed a commit to try to capture these points I've raised on your changes.

[joshmoore]

I've also now added an issue template for inviting implementations.

[joshmoore]

Still some more cleanup needed, but re-naming & re-organizing have begun:

Remaining steps:

• Most of the Joshes need to be removed! 🤪 (When you create a team you get added automatically)
• Offer to remove python-devs (and create new teams as necessary)
• Add people at the appropriate levels (copying up?)
• ...

[joshmoore]

I've just pushed a few minor cleanups after the approval during the recent steering council meeting (Apr. 28th) There are a few synchronizations that are needed with ZEP0 (#16) when it is merged, but merging this so that we can start sending out the invites.

Thanks everyone! 💯 🎸